- Studio: Warner Bros. Pictures
- Release Date: Sep 24, 2010
- Critic Score
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Director Zack Snyder (300) has crafted the rare 3-D eyegasm that's worth the premium ticket price.
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75The film is surprisingly deft and entertains at both the adult and juvenile levels. If something in Guardians catches your eye, trust your gizzard.
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75A splendid adventure sure to thrill children and fantasy buffs, while leaving everyone else passably entertained.
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70This picture sometimes rivals "Avatar" in its spectacular landscapes and thrilling flying sequences, but of course it won't come anywhere near those megagrosses, and it's too scary to be wholeheartedly embraced by children.
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70There's a confusion that you can sense as well, with the film pulled between its light and dark sides just as the owls struggle with forces of good and evil. That hesitation keeps "Guardians" from reaching the deep, emotionally rich center that confers greatness in the animation world.
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63The movie is beautiful but, for one unfamiliar with the source material, confusing. I needed an owl scorecard.
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63The result is sometimes charming and always visually astonishing.
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63A gorgeously animated combat fantasy - "The Lord of the Rings" meets "Happy Feet."
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60The script is merely serviceable and too reminiscent of similar fantasy tales. But kids will instantly relate to the gentle Soren, while watching wide-eyed as he faces each challenge.
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60This is unlikely to win Kathryn Lansky's antipodean owl fantasy any new fans, but even the bemused (and confused) can luxuriate in some grand-scale visual storytelling.
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60Directorially, the film takes a few too many trips into prosaic slow motion.
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60Issues of faith, courage, loyalty, sacrifice and betrayal (the last perpetrated by Soren's brother) are all tackled by Snyder with understated maturity, though a series of slightly repetitive aerial skirmishes can't quite match the inventiveness of Feet's buoyant song-and-dance mash-ups.
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58Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.
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50Legend of the Guardians sounds as if it were scripted by a team of 11-year-old boys, with too much plot for its 91-minute running time, a script that steals liberally from "Star Wars" and some occasionally eye-roll-worthy weirdness.
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Legend of the Guardians may be a hoot, but for all its pyrotechnics, it fails to soar.
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50Though visually stunning and blessed with immaculate 3D work, film is fatally bogged down by tackling an essentially ridiculous premise (gladiator-attired owls fight genocide) with stony solemnity, and by subsisting on a note of sustained menace and terror in what is ostensibly a children's film.
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40Zack Snyder's films have some of the best opening-credits sequences in cinema; the unfortunate thing is that there's always a movie after them.
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40The sketchy visual traits that differentiate the many characters in this avian universe will leave viewers crying, "Who, who" along with the owls.
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38The movie is still a mess, stumbling from comic-relief scenes that aren't funny to a job-training interlude in which we learn that, among other things, owls make excellent . . . blacksmiths?
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38And the action? It's especially hard to determine who's fighting whom in "Legends," because, well, because they are a bunch of owls.
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38An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.